Josh Ozersky is a James Beard Award-winning food writer, B-list food personality, and noted polymath and deviant. The founder of Meatopia, he will answer all your questions on meat, food, food writing, relationships, restaurants, or cooking. He is also available for private tutorials.

Dogs, like their owners, were meant to eat meat, and we forget this fact at the peril of our very selves. Well, maybe I am overstating this. Unlike the Stark direwolves – Grey Wind, Summer, Lady, Nymeria, Shaggydog and Ghost, in case you've forgotten – Judah doesn't embody some part of my soul that I dare not confront. On the contrary, he represents the best part of me. He is all id and natural urges, love and hunger and life-force, and the thing that drives him most is meat.

It is for this reason that I feed him only whole body parts, and you should do the same.

Judah lives on raw meat, bones and all. He ate half a chicken yesterday. He is gleefully devouring a beef heart as I write this. He is on something called Prey Model Raw, and has been since he was weaned. It's not merely for the Jungian aspects that I feed him whole animals. He is, like all dogs, basically wolf, and not born to eat millet capsules or pink slime. He was meant to eat animals. You need only go to the Wolf Conservation Center in South Salem, New York to see the truth of this. Atka, Zephyr, and their fellow citizens eat only whole deer carcasses, as you can tell from the energy they radiate. We humans came to the meat game late, and spent hundreds of thousands of years eating roots and berries. Not so the wolf, and it is that fact, I suspect, that makes dogs so important to us, and why we owe it to them to feed them right. Prey Model Raw calls for meat, and organ meat, and bones, and it has made Judah's coat shiny and his eyes bright and his body strong – stronger than it should be for his four months on the earth.

There is some dispute about Prey Model Raw. People will tell you that the bones are bad for dogs' tender stomachs, that the big pieces can cause them to choke, that they need more beta-carotene or whatever, and other such ludicrous objections. Take a look at my dog up there. Does he look malnourished? Do I? Other objections are subtler and more cynical. The rival "BARF" school maintains that dogs should eat raw meat, as long as it's ground up and mixed with some kind of proprietary supplement they will be glad to sell you. Other dog owners, rightly eschewing commercial dog food, a revolting offal and soybean slurry as nasty as the bacteria it harbors, go in for 'holistic" canned food. Well-meaning but misguided, and projecting their own effete tastes onto their canine charges, they even force vegetarian kibble onto the hapless beasts. This kind of dog abuse is just unconscionable. These are the same people that complain endlessly about cows being forced to eat grain "because they evolved to eat grass." I would sooner put Judah in a sailor suit than I would feed him "dog food" of any kind. Deer, elk, moose, steers, and decaying hikers are dog food. And not just their muscles, either. Judah's teeth gleam white and his breath is sweet.

But I have to confess, I have deeper reasons for feeding my dog on the Prey Model Raw diet. One is the satisfaction that can only come from watching someone you love being most wholly and uninhibitedly themselves. I sometimes lose track of my identity as a man. No doubt, the moral imperatives of adult life are good for you. Monogamy, clean bedlinens, eschewing barroom violence, listening to other people – these are the price of being better than ourselves, of transcending the feral brutishness of our natures. I get that. But Judah, though not really a direwolf, is still the embodiment of all my most essential uncurbed instincts, and to see him fulfilling who and what he is, and getting healthier as a result, makes me feel better about the world. There was never any chance that my dog wouldn't eat raw animal parts. I was just lucky that my wife was able to find an actual method and reason for doing so. To her intelligence, and to Judah's blind urges, the twin poles of my moral compass, I owe my current happiness. I recommend it to every man, and to every man's dog.